Surviving breast cancer changed the course of Regina Barzilay's research. The experience showed her, in stark relief, that oncologists and their patients lack tools for data-driven decision making. That includes what treatments ...

In October of 1955, Ford marketing executive Robert Young recruited modernist poet Marianne Moore to name the company's new car. Although the marketing department had already created a list of 300 candidates, Young confessed ...

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Florida is launching an initiative that will use a custom-designed video game to boost computational thinking in middle school ...

In today's computer chips, memory management is based on what computer scientists call the principle of locality: If a program needs a chunk of data stored at some memory location, it probably needs the neighboring chunks ...

Two Cornell experts in artificial intelligence (AI) have joined a nationwide team setting out to ensure that when computers are running the world, they will make decisions compatible with human values.

For the past 30 years, computer science researchers have been teaching their machines to read, for example, assigning back issues of the Wall Street Journal, so computers can learn the English they need to run search engines ...

Computer science

Computer science (or computing science) is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that describe and transform information. According to Peter J. Denning, the fundamental question underlying computer science is, "What can be (efficiently) automated?" Computer science has many sub-fields; some, such as computer graphics, emphasize the computation of specific results, while others, such as computational complexity theory, study the properties of computational problems. Still others focus on the challenges in implementing computations. For example, programming language theory studies approaches to describing computations, while computer programming applies specific programming languages to solve specific computational problems, and human-computer interaction focuses on the challenges in making computers and computations useful, usable, and universally accessible to people.

The general public sometimes confuses computer science with vocational areas that deal with computers (such as information technology), or think that it relates to their own experience of computers, which typically involves activities such as gaming, web-browsing, and word-processing. However, the focus of computer science is more on understanding the properties of the programs used to implement software such as games and web-browsers, and using that understanding to create new programs or improve existing ones.